Wednesday, August 24, 2016

With his signature, President Barack Obama in June made
the Stonewall Inn in New York City a national monument with the protection of a
national park.

“Stonewall will be our first national monument to tell
the story of the struggle for LGBT rights,” the president said in a White House
video announcing the new monument.

“I believe our national parks should reflect the full
story of our country – the richness and diversity and uniquely American spirit
that has always defined us,” he said.

Decades ago, the Stonewall Inn was a popular gay bar in
Greenwich Village at a time in the city when serving alcohol to gay people was
illegal. Police raids were frequent, but in June 1969 a raid led to riots and
then to protest marches. The Stonewall Uprising was a turning point in the gay
rights movement.

Not everyone was thrilled with the designation of a
gay bar as a monument. Evangelical Christian leader Franklin Graham, son of
televangelist Billy Graham, called the Stonewall recognition “unbelievable.”

“War heroes deserve a monument, our nation’s founding
fathers deserve a monument, people who have helped make America strong deserve
a monument – but a monument to sin?” Graham wrote on Facebook.

Graham has a right to his opinion, but I’m with those who
celebrate our nation’s diversity and the fights by racial, ethnic and other
groups for equality.

From now on, Stonewall will be recognized as a
watershed for gay rights the way Selma, Ala., is for voting rights for blacks
and Seneca Falls, New York, is for women’s suffrage.

Congress authorized the Women’s Rights National
Historical Park in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1980, commemorating the first
Women’s Rights Convention there in 1848, and created the Selma to Montgomery
National Historic Trail in 1996. The 54-mile trail tells the story of the 1965 march
that led President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act.

The Stonewall National Monument includes the bar, a
triangular park across the street and nearby streets – 7.7-acres in all – and,
managed by the park service, will preserve the stories of the gay rights movement
for future generations.

It’s fitting as the park service celebrates its 100th
birthday that its centennial mission is “a promise to America that we will keep
not only its sacred places, but the memory of its most defining moments,”
Jonathan Jarvis, park service director, said at the National Press Club this
month.

Besides Stonewall, Obama has authorized the
Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument in Washington, D.C., the Cesar
E. Chavez National Monument in California, the Harriet Tubman Underground
Railroad National Monument in Maryland and the Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers
National Monument in Ohio, among others.

Obama’s protection of lesser known historic sites
ensures that some details of the American experience we might sweep under the
rug will be remembered. The new monuments build his legacy as a champion of
diversity and provide a way for him to honor key Democratic constituencies.

While only Congress can create a national park, the
president and Congress have the authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to create
national monuments to protect “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric
structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest.”

National parks were never about scenery alone. History
was always part of the picture.

When President Woodrow Wilson signed the legislation creating
the National Park Service 100 years ago this week, Aug. 25, 1916, he brought
together in the new bureau 35 parks and monuments and those yet to be
established.

The purpose was “to conserve the scenery and the
natural and historic objects and the wildlife . . . by such means as will leave
them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

Today we’re all better off because we have more than
400 national park areas.

We’re fortunate Congress thought to preserve historic
objects and places as well as beautiful vistas. And we can thank the National
Park Service for finding ways to help us understand all aspects of the American
experience and reinterpreting historical events as times – and passions -- change.

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

A young woman walking in my neighborhood the other morning
had her eyes not on her phone, playing Pokémon Go, but on the page of a book.

“Must be a good book,” I said as we passed, catching a
glimpse of the cover. “Oh, it is!” she assured me.

It was a romance novel – but no judging. It cheered me
immensely to see a millennial so engrossed in a physical book that she couldn’t
bear to put it down.

Evidently, she’s not alone. There’s good news,
finally, about books. We can stop writing the obituary for the physical book.

Retail sales at bookstores were up 6.1 percent in the
first six months of the year compared with the first six months of last year,
according to the Census Bureau.

And 2015
was healthy too, with bookstore sales up 2.5 percent over 2014, the first
annual increase since 2007, Publishers Weekly reports.

Spurring sales in 2015 was the No. 1 bestseller “Go
Set a Watchman,” Harper Lee’s first book since “To Kill a Mockingbird.” People
had been waiting 55 years.

This year’s presidential election has juiced
bookstores with political tomes. The top four non-fiction books on this week’s New
York Times best seller list are anti-Clinton or anti-progressive.

Physical books outsold ebooks last year for the second
consecutive year, with revenue from hardbacks up 8 percent, the Association of
American Publishers reported last month in its annual survey.

People are also listening to more books. Revenues from
downloaded audio books have nearly doubled since 2012, the publishers’ survey
found.

Even more surprising in the era of modernistic temples
to Apple: Dusty, used bookshops are a hot new retail venue. Among the cities
where used bookshops are making a comeback are New York, Washington and
Richmond, Va., according to news reports.

“There’s a used bookstore renaissance going on in New
York City right now,” Benjamin Friedman, co-owner of a bookstore café in
Queens, told The Wall Street Journal, whose reporter Anne Kadet last month counted
more than 30 used bookshops in the city, and more than 50 when she included
rare-book dealers.

For me, few pastimes are more enjoyable than browsing books,
new or used, in bookstores. I recently was in a used bookstore in Staunton,
Va., where an old – make that classic -- jazz record was playing on a
turntable. Perfect!

If “vinyl” can be cool, why not books with paper
pages? The White House said President Barack Obama took five books with him on
vacation.

For the first time, The New York Times devoted a
special section of the full-sized paper to an excerpt from the acclaimed new
novel, “The Underground Railroad” by Colson Whitehead, and said it was the
first of an occasional series of long excerpts from new books.

“Though we are excited by innovations like virtual
reality and digital storytelling, we also recognize the lasting power of the
broadsheet,” the editor wrote. The section was “a special ink-on-paper product,
one not available in digital form. It is finite and tactile; to read it you
must have gotten your hands on the Sunday paper.”

Think about that. The
Times made something available only in the newspaper, making paper more valuable
than digital. Brilliant.

Here’s another bit of good news about books: People
who read books live longer than those who don’t, a Yale study reports.

The study of 3,635 people 50 and older over 12 years found
that book readers lived longer than non-book readers. Those who read books for
three-and-a-half hours a week or more – half an hour a day -- lived on average
almost two years longer than those who didn’t read books or just read
newspapers and magazines.

Reading books promotes “deep reading,” engaging the
brain more than newspapers or magazines do, and can foster empathy and other
traits that lead to greater survival, Avni Bavishi, Martin D. Slade and Becca
R. Levy wrote in their study, “A chapter a day: Association of book reading
with longevity.”

“We also found that any book reading gives a survival
advantage over no book reading,” Levy, a professor of epidemiology and
psychology at Yale, said in an email.

There’s never been a better time to crack open a book
– and you may live longer to read more.

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Before the Obamas decamped to Martha’s Vineyard last
weekend on vacation, President Barack Obama said in his weekly radio address:

“Every four years, our nation’s attention turns to a
competition that’s as heated as it is historic. People pack arenas and wave
flags. Journalists judge every move and overanalyze every misstep. Sometimes
we’re let down, but more often we’re lifted up. And just when we think we’ve
seen it all, we see something happen in a race that we’ve never seen before.

“I’m talking, of course,” Obama said, “about the
Summer Olympics.”

Good one. And he was right. The Olympics, unlike that
other quadrennial contest, haven’t let us down.

The Rio games are historic, dramatic and fun. We see
some of the best American athletes who have ever competed. Their drive, joy and
patriotism are infectious.

And don’t forget attitude. Who knew wagging an index
finger could say so much?

Swimmer Lilly King, 19, a first-time Olympian, wagged
her finger twice to mock Russian competitor Yulia Efimova for doping, after Efimova,
24, who was allowed to compete in Rio at the 11th hour, wagged her
finger No. 1 after winning a preliminary heat.

“You wave your finger No. 1 and you’re caught drug
cheating? I’m just not a fan,” King said in an interview with NBC.

After she beat the Russian by two-hundredths of a
second to win the gold for the 100-meter breaststroke, King said, “It’s
incredible, just winning a gold medal and knowing I did it clean.” Take that,
Russia.

Then, superstar swimmer Michael Phelps, competing in
his fifth Olympics, wagged his finger No. 1 after he won his 20th
gold medal and beat his arch rival.

Earlier, Phelps blew up the Internet with his
caught-on-camera “death stare” at Chad le Clos of South Africa. Le Clos was
dancing and shadow boxing right in front of Phelps in the warm-up room before
the 200-meter butterfly competition.

Phelps reclaimed the gold le Clos had won in the 2012
Olympics in London, and le Clos came in fourth in Rio.

Those displays of one-upmanship pale compared to the
trash-talking on the campaign trail. This may be the first time a major party presidential
nominee has been so willing to set tongues wagging.

We don’t need Gallup to tell us we’d rather see athletes
wagging their index fingers than hear the ugly rants of Donald J. Trump or, for
that matter, more damaging revelations from Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Trump’s latest flap involving an off-the-cuff remark may
have been “a joke gone bad,” as House Speaker Paul Ryan, who’s always sweeping
up after the elephant, said. Or it could have been a call to arms to “Second
Amendment people” if Hillary Clinton is elected, as Democrats and some
Republicans charged.

At the rally in Wilmington, N.C., Trump was talking
about what would happen if Clinton were elected: “She wants to abolish,
essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. And, by the way, if she gets to pick
her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people,
maybe there is, I don’t know.”

When his remarks caused a firestorm, Trump blamed the
biased media and insisted he meant Second Amendment supporters should galvanize
to defeat Clinton at the polls. Clinton, who does not want to abolish the
Second Amendment, accused him of “casual inciting of violence.”

The Chinese water torture of released Clinton emails
continues to raise questions about how her work at the State Department
intersected with the Clinton Foundation and what roles Bill Clinton would play
in the White House and the foundation.

No wonder people have Trump -- and Clinton – fatigue.

So we turn gratefully to the Olympics, continuing
through Aug. 21, to cheer Team USA and lift our own spirits. The Olympics are everything
the 2016 presidential campaign is not: Team USA’s inspiring performances contrast
sharply with Trump’s intemperate remarks and Clinton’s excruciatingly
calibrated responses.

Trump is as undisciplined in his speech as the Olympic
heroes are disciplined in sport, and Clinton as stiff as the athletes are
limber.

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Earl Long, governor of Louisiana in the 1940s and ‘50s,
quipped: “When I die, I want to be buried in Louisiana, so I can stay active in
politics.”

The line is good for a groan, but election fraud is no
laughing matter. Our system of government relies on citizens’ believing that
our elected officials hold power legitimately.

Election fraud is almost nonexistent, studies have
found, and yet nearly every presidential campaign brings dire warnings that the
election is about to be stolen.

Republican presidential nominee John McCain claimed before
the 2008 election that Acorn, a group that organizes low-income communities,
was “on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter
history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”

Donald J. Trump is the latest to conjure election fraud.
Not waiting for November, he is preemptively laying the groundwork for a “we
wuz robbed” excuse for losing to Hillary Clinton.

“I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged. I have
to be honest,” the Republican presidential nominee said Monday at a rally in
Ohio. Republicans need to be “watching closely” or the election will be “taken
away from us,” he told Sean Hannity of Fox News.

“The voter-ID
situation has turned out to be a very unfair development,” he told The
Washington Post Tuesday in an interview. “We may have people vote 10 times.”

Trump has a habit of seeing a stacked deck when things
don’t go his way – and even when they do. During the primaries, he railed
against Republican Party rules he said were rigged against him, even though the
rules were set before he entered the race -- and he won handily.

Bernie Sanders also complained the system was rigged
-- against him and in favor of Clinton. In Sanders’ case, however, Democratic
National Committee emails leaked last month backed up the claim.

Candidates preach to the converted about a rigged
system. The 2000 election debacle in Florida fueled lingering cynicism. More
than half the voters believe the way parties pick presidential candidates is “rigged,”
a Reuters/Ipsos poll found in April.

Trump now claims Clinton and the Democratic Party
rigged the presidential debates to fall on NFL game nights – even though an
independent commission, not the political parties, set the schedule. The
debates were scheduled in September 2015; the NFL schedule was set in March
2016, PolitiFact reported.

Election fraud is the rationale for tough new state laws
requiring photo IDs to vote. Thirty-two states have voter ID laws, and 18
require photo IDs.

In the last few weeks, however, federal courts have
ruled against five state voting laws, suggesting in some cases that the
supposed cures for fraud actually would rig the system against minority voters.

North Carolina’s 2013 law targeted black voters “with
almost surgical precision” and was “one of the largest restrictions of the
franchise in modern North Carolina history,” an appeals court ruled.

A federal judge blocked North Dakota’s voter ID law
from going into effect, saying it made it hard for Native Americans to vote. He
cited “a total lack of any evidence to show voter fraud has ever been a problem
in North Dakota.”

A federal appeals court in Texas ruled that state’s
voter ID law discriminatory and ordered a lower court to come up with a
temporary fix before November.

A federal judge told Wisconsin to change its
procedures and make it easier for voters to get IDs so they can vote. Kansas
must count the votes of thousands of people who didn’t show proof of
citizenship when they registered to vote.

In the judicial pipeline
is a voter ID case from Alabama, scheduled to be heard in federal court next
year. In Virginia,
state legislators and the governor are fighting over voting rights for 200,000
felons.

While some may joke about dead-people voting and
ballot-box stuffing, we can’t forget that in many places elections truly were rigged
against minorities for more than a hundred years with poll taxes and literacy
tests. In the 21st century, we need to work together to ensure
integrity and fairness at the polls.

We can’t allow any candidate to destroy the legitimacy
of our election simply because he fears defeat.